International pointers for rebuilding Christchurch

The
experience of rebuilding the Italian town of L’Aquila
after its devastating earthquake in 2009 showed people who
have been through such disasters have a preference for
timber, according to Italian engineers.

Engineer Paolo
Lavisci from the Society of Engineers in Italy said the
people in L’Aquila “were asking for no more concrete”
immediately after the earthquake. The substantial wooden
buildings erected as a result have met with people’s
“full satisfaction”.

“This has projected a very good
image of timber construction everywhere in Italy,” Mr
Lavisci says.

Since then, the use of wood in construction
has taken off in Italy. “Now we have completed designs for
six and eight storeys and are designing for 12 storeys for
large ‘traditional’ building companies who just a year
ago would never even commission a timber house.”

The
shallow 5.8 magnitude earthquake killed 308 people,
destroyed up to 11,000 buildings and left 65,000 of the
medieval town’s population of around 100,000
homeless.

Mr Lavisci’s company won a tender, along with
several other contractors, to build a number of three
storey, 27-apartment blocks using timber. Their construction
took only 72 days – only 14 days for the erection of the
watertight outer shell.

Made from cross-laminated timber
sections, the completed block weighed around 430 tonnes
compared with what would have been more than 2,000 tonnes in
concrete.

The lower mass (weight) of a building, can
lessen the damage sustained from earthquakes.

Dr Geoff
Thomas from Victoria University’s School of Architecture
says earthquake loads or forces on a building are also
proportional to its weight.

Being
inherently lighter and more flexible, timber buildings need
not be as strong as a more rigid structure in order to
resist the same level of earthquake shaking.

“In the
event of a collapse, survival is much more likely in timber
buildings as the lower weight of any falling debris from the
structure is less likely to cause serious injury than that
of heavier materials,” Dr Thomas says.

“Understanding
these facts has resulted in better building design which
saved many lives in the Christchurch and other earthquakes
around the world.”

Following the Kobe earthquake in 1995
which killed 6,300 people, Makoto Watabe, chairman of the
Earthquake Disaster Committee of the Architecture Institute
of Japan did a comparison of mortality rates from people
killed in wooden or concrete structures.

Because of the
pre-dawn timing of the Kobe quake, most people were in their
own homes at the time. More than 80,000 houses – almost 10
percent of all homes in the area – either collapsed
totally or were substantially destroyed.

Mr Watabe said
that in Kobe, while the number of wooden house collapses was
very high largely due to their light frames and very heavy
tile roofs designed to resist typhoons, they killed
relatively fewer people than the reinforced concrete
buildings which collapsed. Approximately one person was
killed for every 16 collapsed wooden houses.

“Assuming
an average of three people lived in each house, that is
about a two percent mortality rate,” he said.

"In the
case of reinforced concrete construction, while there
weren't as many collapses, that percentage went up to 15
percent - a big difference."

In short, while in Kobe there
was less chance of a reinforced concrete building collapsing
than their poorly designed houses, if you were in one that
did, you had a greater chance of being killed.

Dr Thomas
said that timber buildings of six stories or more are now
being designed and built to resist earthquake loads.

“Such buildings are common in earthquake prone regions
such as Vancouver, Canada and Seattle.

“A full size
seven storey cross-laminated timber building survived
testing at levels of up to 0.8 times the force of gravity,
on the E-Defense earthquake shaking table in Japan in
2007.”

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